(C) U.S. State Dept
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A French artist designed the U.S. capital city [1]

['Susan Milligan']

Date: 2025-07-22 14:00:00+00:00

He volunteered to fight in America’s Revolutionary War. He crafted the design for the nation’s capital. And after he died, he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, on a hillside overlooking the grand avenues, whimsical circles and public squares of the capital city he fought to establish.

He was a Frenchman.

Pierre L’Enfant — “Peter,” as he preferred to be called — was an early figure in the Franco-American relationship that began even before the United States was a country.

Remarkably, L’Enfant’s vision for Washington’s streetscape, drawn from his artistic Parisian background, remains intact. L’Enfant “just turned [his vision] from French to American. He translated it into a new language,” says Judy Scott Feldman, chair of the National Mall Coalition, which works to preserve the grassy rectangle stretching between the Lincoln Memorial and the U.S. Capitol.

“How amazing it is that we’re still living inside of the brain of one person, 235 years later, says Scott W. Berg of L’Enfant’s Washington. “It’s like living inside a painting or a song,” says Berg, author of Grand Avenues: The Story of Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C.

The very layout of the nation’s capital signals power. “The vistas take you from monument to monument, from symbol to symbol. And that was all in the original 1791 plan, which is, in my view, genius,” says Feldman.

“It’s a visual representation of our history … our political branches and our president. It’s just designed so much to inspire,” says educator Glen Worthington, who wrote on L’Enfant for the Georgetown University Law Center. The White House, the Capitol and the Supreme Court remind their occupants of the separation of powers so important to the U.S. democracy, he says. What’s more, each location offers views of monuments to past presidents.

Yet L’Enfant designed a city that accommodates not just a government, but people — whether picnickers on the National Mall, tourists gazing at monuments or locals slowed down by one of the city’s many traffic circles.

An artist-soldier’s vision

It wasn’t easy for L’Enfant. The son of an artist, neither distinguished nor wealthy, he studied at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris before crossing the ocean to join the American colonists’ Revolutionary War as a low-level volunteer. The war left him wounded and, for a time, imprisoned. Yet, in 1791, President George Washington commissioned L’Enfant to design the young nation’s capital.

L’Enfant’s was an ambitious plan, one that included grand government buildings cleverly connected by avenues, as well as parks and open spaces. The avenues, which have since been named for U.S. states, spread out from the Capitol like a starburst. Traffic circles and squares with benches and grassy areas inside them offer gathering places. While Paris’s boulevards were not built until after L’Enfant’s time, Washington’s streets have had a European look since their earliest days. L’Enfant created a city layout distinguished from the grid-like layout of other early American cities such as New York.

Aiding L’Enfant was the fact that Washington was one of the few U.S. cities to be designed entirely from scratch (as opposed to building out organically from a fort or settlement). “The plan for Washington is the most ambitious and the most intact colonial-era city plan in America,” says Charles A. Birnbaum, founder of the Cultural Landscape Foundation.

For all his fortuitous opportunity, L’Enfant experienced pushback on his ideas: Thomas Jefferson, who had envisioned a country of small towns, didn’t like the idea of a big city to house the federal government. And in 1792, after L’Enfant clashed with city commissioners and demolished a local landowner’s home because it stood in the way of a planned avenue, President Washington reluctantly fired L’Enfant.

When L’Enfant died penniless in 1825, he had not been paid for his capital design. But his vision endured: When the McMillan Commission, created by the U.S. Senate many decades later, in 1901, set about updating L’Enfant’s plan, it preserved much of it and focused mainly on adding memorials to Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, both of whom outlived L’Enfant.

L’Enfant’s contribution to Washington and the United States gained widespread recognition in 1909, when his remains were moved to Arlington National Cemetery. Then-President William Howard Taft dedicated a monument at L’Enfant’s gravesite at an event attended by members of Congress, Supreme Court justices and French Ambassador to the U.S. Jean Jules Jusserand.

While Washington today accommodates things L’Enfant could not have envisioned — cars, train stations and the like — “it’s still the world city L’Enfant envisioned it to be,” Berg says.

Susan Milligan is a freelance writer.

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[1] Url: https://share.america.gov/a-french-artist-designed-the-u-s-capital-city/

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